Cloudflare and Xenforo? (Any better alternatives?)

Go to page

Member

Their SSL license and Anti-DDOS works great.
Their CDN works great too.

I get customers who complain that our XenForo site is slow, times-out often (don't know why) or XenForo loads very slowly with Cloudflare, despite us re-installing XenForo twice, moving to Core i7-2600K with SSD drives.

Well-known member

Their SSL license and Anti-DDOS works great.
Their CDN works great too.

I get customers who complain that our XenForo site is slow, times-out often (don't know why) or XenForo loads very slowly with Cloudflare, despite us re-installing XenForo twice, moving to Core i7-2600K with SSD drives.

Well-known member

TBH I've just disabled cloudflare, it's really gone down hill over the last few months. I'm pretty sure they were intentionally showing the 'site offline' page, smothered with their ads whenever they wanted. I'd visit my site several times a day, and it'd be reported as offline. Server loads were fine, DNS was fine, etc, the second I turn cloudflare off, the site works again.

That combined with their stupidly weak DNS system (as proved by the complete outage not long ago) was the final straw for me. Moved away and our earnings are up, analytics is showing better performance, etc.

Well-known member

Same issue here Rick. One of my sites (not powered by XF) was on CloudFlare till last month. The "site offline" page would show at least 3 times a day when I knew the server was fine. Since disabling it, my site has been faster and hasn't had a single moment of downtime.

Well-known member

TBH I've just disabled cloudflare, it's really gone down hill over the last few months. I'm pretty sure they were intentionally showing the 'site offline' page, smothered with their ads whenever they wanted. I'd visit my site several times a day, and it'd be reported as offline. Server loads were fine, DNS was fine, etc, the second I turn cloudflare off, the site works again.

That combined with their stupidly weak DNS system (as proved by the complete outage not long ago) was the final straw for me. Moved away and our earnings are up, analytics is showing better performance, etc.

I had exactly the same issues with them a year ago when I first started using claudflare. While using them I was often getting site offline pages although other sites on the same server which don't use claudflare was online, so I stopped using it.

Active member

I have read a lot of issues like this recently and declined to even try cloudflare because of it. Most people I know who have used it have had nothing but trouble, and unnecessary downtime. That's sort of what it's meant to stop.

Member

What's the difference?
I host on Xeon E3 1245v2 and SSD drives, Gigabyte pipe. Latest PHP, MariaDB. Server utilization is less than 3% for most of the day, Bandwidth is less than 20GB/month. For almost a year, customers complained about slow site, time-outs, weird "Site Down" notice for no apparent reason.

Cloudflare, I have gone through their support several times. Disabled Rocket feature, disabled minify JS, disabled their CDN. Custom rules addition to exclude Xenforo, Added high security (Pro Feature). Still slowness for no reason. On various occasions, customer would tell they waited 1 minute (or even more), site was usually unavailable to mobile customers. Android customers with old browsers often get blocked and sucks since most of our customers are Mobile users.

...

Incapsula, I had an initial problem because Cloudflare was doing the DNS. So I switched back to Registrars (GoDaddy's) DNS and setup @ and WWW aliases as requested.

(Fed-up now...) Copied and pasted the rest of info to GoDaddy from CloudFlare. Then I disabled the Pro Hosting plan. Waited another 30 minutes while wondering if the instructions on Incapsula is correct?

(Angry...) Took screenshots of the domains config and other necessary information. Deleted my domains from CloudFlare. After 30 minutes later, Incapsula works.

Well-known member

I admit that tech has changed for the better and usually changing a DNS for me happens within minutes, but its still possible for it to take the full 24 - 72 hours (lots of factors to add into that time such as ISP, IP range, location, ect...)

My IP wouldn't be blocked for anything
I've seen others mention it as well, I really have no use for a mod so that's the main reason I'll never use it, I don't care for disallowing access to anyone that should see a site.

If you are having good results with Cloudflare - good for you. I didn't see anyone sharing best-practices settings information on exactly what to set. In the end, it got too much for us and had to let it go.